1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the construction, reconciliation and balancing of cash register cash drawers or tills. The invention also relates to a method and computer program for building and replenishing cash drawers with loose coins rather than rolls of coins.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Grocery stores and other retail and wholesale establishments use cash registers to ring up sales and collect money from customers. Cash drawers or tills from these cash registers must be regularly reconciled or balanced at the end of shifts to ensure that the money in the cash drawers matches sales figures for the cash registers. Cash drawers must also be rebuilt or constructed in preparation for cashiers starting new shifts.
Most stores typically balance and construct cash drawers with back office accounting personnel who manually remove and count the money from cash drawers after cashiers' shifts have ended and manually count and add money to new cash drawers. Those skilled in the art will appreciate that such manual methods of balancing and constructing cash drawers are very time consuming and often lead to miscounting errors. For large stores that regularly balance and construct many cash drawers every day, the costs associated with such cash drawer balancing and construction can be substantial.
Systems and methods that automate some aspects of cash drawer balancing and construction have been developed. However, these systems and methods still require accounting personnel to manually perform many of the steps required to balance and build cash drawers and therefore are still time consuming and prone to miscounting errors.
Another problem with prior art systems and methods of cash drawer balancing and reconciliation is the need to repeatedly perform pick-ups (the removal of excess cash from cash drawers for security reasons), loans (the addition of extra cash into cash drawers for change-making purposes), and/or the purchase of additional change by cashiers. Pick-ups, loans, and change purchasing procedures typically involve several employees and therefore use a considerable amount of labor, especially for large stores.
Another problem with prior art systems and methods of cash drawer balancing and reconciliation is they use rolled coins to construct or rebuild cash drawers with an adequate amount of coins to make change. The use of rolled coins is undesirable for several reasons. First, rolled coins are expensive and/or require a great deal of labor to obtain. If rolled coins are purchased from banks, a fee of 3¢-10¢ for each roll is typically charged because banks must purchase and operate expensive automated coin sorting machines to sort, count, and roll the coins prior to purchase. These charges can be significant for stores that have many cash registers and therefore need a large and steady supply of rolled coins. Stores may also obtain rolled coins by emptying, sorting, counting, and rolling coins from store-owned or serviced vending machines, coin-operated copiers, and other coin-operated equipment. Although this saves the fees charged by banks for rolled coins, these procedures are very labor intensive. Second, rolls of coins are difficult to open, especially when wrapped in newer-type plastic sleeves, resulting in increased labor costs when adding coins to cash drawers. Third, once rolls of coins are unwrapped and placed into cash drawers, they must typically be manually recounted when the cash drawers are balanced.